The Great Sea-Serpent

A New Wonder Story

by

Hans Christian Andersen

Scribner’s Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 3 (January 1872): 325-329.

HERE was a little fish—a salt-water
fish—of good family: I don’t recall the name—you will have to get that
from the learned people. This little fish had eighteen hundred brothers
and sisters all just as old as he; they did not know their father and
mother, and were obliged to look out for themselves at the very
beginning, and swim round, but that was great sport. They had water
enough to drink, the entire ocean; they thought nothing about their food,
it came when they wanted it. Each did as it pleased, each was to make out
its own story—ay, rather none of them thought at all about that. The sun
shone down on the water that was light about them, so clear was it. It
was a world with the strangest creatures, and some very horrid and big,
with great gaping mouths that could gulp down all the eighteen hundred
brothers and sisters, but neither did they think of that, for none of
them as yet had been swallowed. The small ones swam side by side close
together, as herrings and mackerel swim. But as they were swimming their
prettiest in the water and thinking of nothing, there sank with
prodigious noise, from above, right down through them, a long heavy thing
that looked as if it never would come to an end; it stretched out farther
and farther, and every one of the little fishes that scampered off was
either crushed or got a crack that it could not stand. All the little
fishes, and the great ones with them, from the level of the sea to the
bottom, were thrown into a panic. The great horrid thing sank deeper and
deeper, and grew longer and longer, miles and miles long. The fishes and
snails, everything that swims, or creeps, or is driven by the current,
saw this fearful thing, this enormous incomprehensible sea-eel which had
come down upon them in this fashion.

What was the thing, anyway? ah, we know; it was the great interminable
telegraph cable that people were laying between Europe and America.

There was a confusion and commotion amongst all the rightful occupants of
the sea where the cable was laid. The flying fishes shot up above the
surface as high as they could fling themselves; the blow-fish took a leap
an entire gunshot in length over the water, for it can do that; the other
fish made
for the bottom of the sea, and went down with such haste that they
reached it long before the telegraph was seen or known about down there;
they poured in on the cod and flounders that lived peaceably at the
bottom of the sea and ate their neighbors. One or two of the sea-anemones
were so agitated that they threw up their stomachs, but they lived after
it just the same, for they can do that. A good many lobsters and crabs
got out of their excellent shells, and were obliged to wait for their
bones to grow back again.

In all this fright and confusion, the eighteen hundred brethren and
sisters became separated, and never agan met, or ever knew each other
after that; only some ten of them remain ed still in the same place, and
so in a few hours they got over the first fright and began to be curious
about the affair. They looked about them, they looked up and they looked
down, and down in the depths they fancied they saw the fearful thing that
had scared them—yes, had scared all, great and small, lying on the bottom
of the sea, as far as their eyes could reach; it was quite thin, but they
did not know how thick it might be able to make itself, or how strong it
was; it lay very quiet, but then that might be a part of its cunning,
they thought.

“Let it lie; it does not come near us!” said the most cautious of the
little fishes; but the smallest one of all would not give up trying to
find out what the thing could be. It had come down from above, so it was
up above that one could best find out about it. So they swam up to the
surface. It was perfectly still. They met a dolphin there. The dolphin is
a sprightly fellow that can turn somersaults on the water, and it has
eyes to see with, so iht must have seen this and known all about it. They
asked him, but he had only been thinking about himself and his
somersaults, he’d seen nothing, had no answer for them, and only looked
high and mighty.

Then they turned to the seal, which was just plunging in; it was more
civil, for all that it eats small fish; but to-day it had had enough. It
knew little more than the dolphin.

“Many a night have I lain upon a wet stone and looked far into the
country, miles away from here; there are crafty creatures called in their
speech men-folk. They plot against us, but usually we slip away from
them; that I know well, and the sea-eel too, that you are asking about,
he knows it. He has been under their sway, up there on the earth, time
out of mind, and it was from there that they were carrying him off on a
ship to a distant land. I saw what a trouble they had, Shut they could
manage him, because he had become weak on the earth. They laid him in
coils and circles. I heard how he ringled and rangled when they laid him
down and when he slipped away from them out here. They held on to him
with all their might—ever so many hands had hold of him, but he kept
slipping away from them down to the bottom; there he is lying now—till
further notice, I rather think.”

“He is quite thin,” said the small fishes.

“They have starved him,” said the seal, “but he will soon come to
himself, and get his old size and corpulence again. I suppose he is the
great sea-serpent that men are so afraid of and talk so much about. I
never saw him before, and never believed in a sea-serpent; now I do. I
believe he is the sea-serpent,” and with that down went the seal.

“How much he knew! how he talked!” said the small fishes; “I never was so
wise before; if it only isn’t all an untruth.”

“We can, anyway, swim down and see for ourselves,” said the littlest
fish; “on the way we can hear what the others think about it.”

“I wouldn’t make a stroke with my fins to get at something to know,” said
the others, and turned away.

“But I would !“ said the littlest fellow, and put off down into deep
water; but it was a good distance from the place where “the long thing
that sank” lay. The little fish looked and hunted on all sides down in
tne deep water. Never before had it imagined the world to be so big. The
herrings went in great shoals, shining like a mighty ribbon of silver;
the mackerel followed after, and looked even finer. There were fishes
there of all fashions and marked with every possible color: jelly-fish,
like half-transparent flowers, borne along by the currents. Great plants
grew up from the floor of the ocean; grass, fathoms long, and palm-like
trees, every leaf tenanted by shining shell-fish.

At last the little fish spied a long dark streak away down, and made his
way toward it, but it was neither fish nor cable: it was the gunwale of a
sunken vessel, which above and below the deck was broken in two by the
force of the sea. The little fish swam into the cabin, where the people
who perished when the vessel sank were all washed away, except two: a
young woman lay there stretched out, with her little child in her arms.
They seemed to be sleeping. The little fish was quite frightened, for it
did not know that they never again could waken. Sea-weed hung like a
net-work of foliage over the gun-
wale above the two beautiful bodies of mother and babe. it was so quiet,
so solitary: the little fish scampered away as fast as it could, out
where the water was bright and clear, and there were fishes to see. It
had not gone far before it met a whale, fearfully big.

“Don’t swallow me!” cried the little fish; “I am not even to be tasted, I
am so small. and it is a great comfort to me to live.”

“What are you doing away down here, where your kind never come?” asked
the whale.

So then the little fish told about the astonishingly long eel, or
whatever the thing was, that had sunk down from above and produced such a
panic amongst all the other creatures in the sea.

“Ho, ho!” said the whale, and he drew in such a rush of water that he was
ready to make a prodigious spout when he came to the surface for a
breath. “Ho, ho! so that was the thing that tickled me on the back when I
was turning round. I thought it was a ship’s mast, that I could break up
into clothes-pins. But it was not here that it was; no, a good deal
farther out lies the thing. I’ll go with you and look for it, for I have
nothing else to do;” and so it swam off, and the little fish behind it,
not too near, because there was a tearing stream, as it were, in the wake
of the whale.

They met a shark and an old saw-fish; they, too, had heard of the famous
sea-eel, so long and so thin; they had not seen it, but now they would.

“I’ll go with you,” said the shark, who was on the same road; “if the
great sea-serpent is no thicker than a cable, then I can bite through it
in one bite,” and he opened his mouth and showed his six rows of teeth—”
I can bite dents in a ship’s anchor, and certainly can bite off the
shank.”

“There it is!” said the great whale ; “I see him.” He thought he saw
better than the others. “See how it rises, how it bends and bows and
curves!”

But it was not the sea-serpent, but an extraordinarily great eel, ever so
many ells long, that drew near.

“Why, I have seen him before!” said the saw-fish. “He never has made a
hullabaloo in the sea or frightened any big fish out of his wits.” And so
they talked to him of the new eel, and asked him if he would go with them
on their voyage of discovery.

“If that eel is longer than I am,” said the sea-eel, “there will be
something disagreeable happening.”

“Ay, that there will,” said the others; “there are enough of us not to
tolerate him!” and so they shot ahead. But then there came right in their
way a great monster, bigger than all of them put together; it looked like
a floating island, that could not stop itself. It was a venerable whale.
Its head was grown over with sea-weed, its back covered with barnacles,
and such innumerable oysters and mussels, that its black skin was
altogether whitened.

“Come with us, old fellow!” said they. “Here is a new fish come, and we
won’t stand it.”

“I would rather lie where I am lying,” said the whale. “Leave me alone;
leave me alone. O ah, 0 ah! I suffer from a dreadful disease! My only
relief is to get up toward the surface and get my back up higher; then
the great sea-fowl can come and pick at me. That feels so good! only when
they do not drive their beaks in too far; sometimes they go in too deep,
quite into my blubber. You can see now how a complete skeleton of a fowl
is fixed in my back; she struck her claws in too deep, and could not get
them out when I went down to the bottom. And now the little fishes have
picked at her. See how she looks, and how I look. I am all diseased!”

“That is all imagination!” said the shark. “I am never sick. No fish is
ever sick.”

“Pardon me,” said the whale. “The eel suffers from headache, the carp has
the smallpox, and we all have intestinal worms.”

“Nonsense!” said the shark, and refused to hear any further, and the
others also would rather not; they had something else to attend to.

At last they came to the place where the telegraph cable lay. It has a
pretty long bed on the floor of the sea from Europe to America, over
sand-banks and sea-mud, rocky ground and weedy places, entire forests of
coral. The currents down there, too, change, whirlpools eddy, and fishes
swarm in greater masses than the countless flocks of birds that men see
when birds of passage take their flight. There is a stir, a splashing
there, a humming and rushing; the rushing still haunts a little the great
empty conch-shells when we hold them to our ears.

“There lies the fellow!” cried all the great fishes and the little one
with them. They saw the cable, the beginning and end of which vanished
beyond the reach of their eyes. Sponges and polyps swayed from the
ground, rose and fell over it, so that now it was hidden, now came to
view. Sea-porcupines, snails, and worms moved over it. Gigantic crabs,
that had a complete fringe of creeping things, stalked about it. Dark
sea-anemones,
or whatever the creature is called that eats with its entire body, lay
beside it and smelled of the new creature that had stretched itself on
the bottom of the sea. Flounders and codfish turned over in the water so
as to get an idea about it from all sides. The star-fish, that always
bores down into the mud and can keep its eyes outside, lay and stared to
see what was to come of all this bustle.

The telegraph cable lay without stirring, but life and thought were in
it. Human thought went through it. “The thing is crafty,” said the whale;
“it is able to strike me in the stomach, and that is my weak point.”

“Let us grope along,” said the polyps. “I have long arms and limber
fingers; I have been moving by the side of it; now I’ll go a little
faster,” and so it stretched its most flexible, longest arms down to the
cable and round about it. “It has no scales!” said the polyps; “it has no
skin at all. I do believe it never feeds its own young.”

The sea-eel laid itself by the side of the telegraph cable and stretched
out as far as it could. “The thing is longer than I am,” it said; “but it
is not length that does anything; one must have skin, stomach, and
flexibility.”

The whale dove down deeper than it ever had been. “Art thou fish or art
thou plant?” it asked, “or art thou only some piece of work made up above
that cannot thrive down here amongst us?”

The telegraph cable did not answer; it has no power for that. Yet
thoughts go through it, men’s thoughts, that rush in one second miles
upon miles from land to land.

“Will you answer, or will you take a crack?” asked the fierce shark, and
all the other great fishes asked the same thing.

The cable did not stir, but it had its private thought, and such a one it
had a right to have when it was full of thoughts. “Let them only give me
a crack! then I shall be hauled up and be myself again; that has happened
to others of my race in shallower waters.” So it gave no answer; it had
something else to attend to; it telegraphed and lay in its lawful place
at the bottom of the ocean.

Up above, the sun now went down, as men say. It became like flaming fire,
and all the clouds glowed with fiery color, each more splendid than the
other. “Now we shall get the red light,” said the polyps, “and can see
the thing better, if need be.”

“At it! at it!” shouted the shark. “At it! at it!” said the sword-fish
and the whale and the eel. They rushed forward, the shark foremost. But
just as it was about to grip the wire, the sword-fish, out of pure
politeness, ran his saw right into the back of the shark. It was a great
mistake, and the shark lost all his strength for biting. There was a
hubbub down in the mud. Great fishes and small, sea-anemones and snails
rushed at one another, ate each other, mashed and squeezed in. The cable
lay quietly and attended to its affairs, and that one ought to do.

The dark night brooded over them, but the ocean s millions upon millions
of living creatures lighted it; craw-fish, not so big as a pin-head, gave
out light. Some were so small that it took a thousand to make one
pin-head, and yet they gave light. It certainly is wonderful, but that’s
the way it is.

These sea creatures looked at the telegraph wire. “What is that thing?”
they asked, “and what isn’t it?” Ay, that was the question.

Then there came an old sea-cow. Folks on the earth call its kind a
mermaid, or else a merman. This was a she, had a tail and two short arms
to splash with, hanging breasts, and sea-weed and sponges on her head,
and that was what she was proud of.

“Will you have the society of intelligent people?” said she. “I’m the
only one down here that can give it. But I ask in return for it perfectly
secure pasturage on the bottom of the sea for me and mine. I am a fish,
as you see, and I am also an amphibious animal—with practice. I am the
wisest cow in the sea. I know about everything that goes on down here,
and all that goes on above. That thing you are pondering over is from
above, and whatever plumps down from up there is either dead or comes to
be dead and powerless; let it lie there for what it is; it’s only some
invention of man.”

“Now I think there is something more to it,” said the little fish.

“Hold your tongue, mackerel !” said the great sea-cow.

“Stickleback!” said the rest, and that was even more insulting.

And the sea-cow explained to them that this terrible thing, which, to be
sure, had not given out a single mutter, was only some invention from the
dry land. And it delivered a little oration upon the rottenness of men.

“They want to get hold of us.” said she. “That’s all they live for. They
stretch nets for us, and come with bait on a hook to catch us. That thing
there is some kind of big string which they think we are going to bite
at. They are such stupids! We are not. Only do not touch it, and
it will shrivel up and all turn to dust and mud. Everything that
comes down from up there is full of cracks and breaks—it’s good for
nothing.”

“Good for nothing!” said all the creatures in the sea, and held fast to
the sea-cow’s opinion, so as to have an opinion. The little fish had its
own thoughts. “That exceedingly long, thin serpent is perhaps the most
wonderful fish in the ocean. I have a feeling it is.”

“The very most wonderful,” say we human folks, and say it with knowledge
and assurance. It is the great sea-serpent, long ago the theme of song
and story. It was born and nourished and sprang forth from men’s cunning
and was laid upon the bottom of the sea, stretching from the Eastern to
the Western land, bearing messages, quick as light flashes to our earth.
It grows in might and in length, grows year by year through all seas,
round the world, beneath the stormy waves and the lucid waters, where the
skipper looks down as if he sailed through the transparent air, and sees
the swarming fish, brilliant fireworks of color. Down, far down,
stretches the serpent, Midgard’s snake, that bites its own tail as it
encircles the earth. Fish and shell beat upon it with their heads—they
understand not the thing—it is from above. Men’s thoughts in all
languages course through it noiselessly. “The serpent of science for good
and evil, Midgard’s snake, the most wonderful of all the ocean’s wonders,
our—GREAT SEA-SERPENT!”